Pontypool

Pontypool does great stuff for nearly its entire running time.  It kinda blows it right there at the end, but you’ve got to give this picture credit for how much it gets right.

Stephen McHattie plays Grant Mazzie, a has-been shock jock relegated to reading the school closings listing at a third-rate AM station in the sticks somewhere outside of Ontario.  He has a deep, gravelly voice, perfect for radio; and a tired, weathered face, perfect for film.

Mazzie is settling in at his new gig when the first reports of something very disturbing start trickling in.  There’s a gun battle at a nearby lake.  A mob surrounds a doctor’s office.  People start killing each other in particularly nasty ways.  Everything’s quiet in the church basement where radio station’s studio is tucked away, but it sounds like the end of the world out there.  What’s going on?

Pontypool nails this.  McHattie gives a virtuoso performance as a man going from depressed, angry, and a little drunk to skeptical, worried, then scared.  Lisa Houle and Georgina Reilly, as his engineer and assistant, respectively, give him people to bounce off, to fight, to work with, but it’s his show.  His reaction to the offscreen threat makes it real, and it shows us how the anticipation of horror can be scarier than horror itself.

It’s at the end there, when the revelations and realizations hit, that Pontypool falls apart.  But right up ‘til then, when it’s all mystery and dread, this movie is fantastic.  Pontypool may be a qualified winner, but it’s a winner nonetheless.